Plenty of hurdles stand between you and the beach this summer.
Tens of thousands of British Airways flights have been cancelled this summer; Heathrow airport has capped passenger numbers; and easyJet has made a loss because of all the disruption – especially at Gatwick.
On the roads, rails and seas there are a host of problems.
Yet even so, millions of travellers are seeking to get away – and the travel correspondent of The Independent, Simon Calder, tackled questions from some of them.
Flight disruption
Q: If I have a flight from Manchester to London Heathrow to Los Angeles and the Manchester-Heathrow part is cancelled, and the airline can’t find anything else suitable, can I insist they cancel the Manchester-Heathrow bit and insist on keeping the Heathrow-Los Angeles segment, finding my own way to Heathrow?
Cheesemason
A: It looks as though you are booked to fly from Manchester to London Heathrow to Los Angeles with a good connection, but fear that British Airways – which has grounded around 30,000 flights so far this summer – might cancel and not be able to offer a reasonable replacement.
In that hypothetical case you must not drop the Manchester-Heathrow segment without express agreement from BA – otherwise you risk being classed as a no-show and losing the whole itinerary.
Your options rather depend how you define “suitable”: for example an earlier flight with a four-hour connection at London Heathrow, rather than a comfortable 90 minutes, is far from ideal. If that is the situation, you will need to speak to someone at BA to discuss the other options open to you. Perhaps the airline could buy you a rail ticket from Manchester to London and onwards to Heathrow.
If, however, there is no way of getting you on the same day from Manchester to LA using British Airways, then you can argue that the carrier must find you an alternative that allows you to travel on the original day.
The obvious choice would be Aer Lingus from Manchester via Dublin to Los Angeles (also allowing you to clear US Customs and Border Protection while at the Irish airport). The two-hour stop is convenient, and the overall journey is 14h 20m – probably quicker than going via Heathrow.
For future planning: flying from Manchester to California via London strikes me as counter-intuitive, since it involves flying 150 miles in the wrong direction and then flying back over Manchester on your Los Angeles departure. Going via Dublin adds only 35 miles to the direct path between…
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